Apple Said To Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Four Years (bloomberg.com) 304
It's been a while since Apple upgraded most of its computer lineups. It has come to a point, where it's being advised that the Cupertino-based company should stop selling the dated inventories. But the wait will be over later this year, says Mark Gurman, the reporter with the best track record in Apple's ecosystem. Reporting for Bloomberg, Gurman says that the company will be overhauling its MacBook Pro laptop line for the first time in over four years, packing it with a range of interesting features. From the report: The updated notebooks will be thinner, include a touch screen strip for function keys, and will be offered with more powerful and efficient graphics processors for expert users such as video gamers, said the people, who asked not to be named. The most significant addition to the new MacBook Pro is a secondary display above the keyboard that replaces the standard function key row. Instead of physical keys, a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application. The smaller display will use Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, a thinner, lighter and sharper screen technology, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said earlier this year. Apple's goal with the dedicated function display is to simplify keyboard shortcuts traditionally used by experienced users. The panel will theoretically display media playback controls when iTunes is open, while it could display editing commands like cut and paste during word processing tasks, the people said. The display also allows Apple to add new buttons via software updates rather than through more expensive, slower hardware refreshes. [...] Apple is using one of AMD's "Polaris" graphics chips because the design offers the power efficiency and thinness necessary to fit inside the slimmer Apple notebook, the person said.
What about the batteries?? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you open a Macbook Air, the entire thing is filled with tamper-proof epoxy and glue and any type of serviceability is practically impossible.
What about the circuit traces? (Score:4, Funny)
You can't even replace the traces between components without separating the board layers? Madness, everyone knows traces should be on the surface of the board where you can make a nice solder bridge if you so desire or fortune dictates!
Re: What about the circuit traces? (Score:2, Informative)
I own a 2012 rMBP, use it 50 hours a week for 4 years, and have never needed to think about replacing the batteries. It's not an issue.
Re: What about the circuit traces? (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a joke about circuit traces, in case you missed it. The OP was miffed about glued in batteries.
I'm more concerned about an AMD GPU. Nvidia Pascal would be much more efficient and powerful enough for 1800p60. Stop making the pro thinner! 2012 size is perfect. Larger battery and GPU is preferred Apple.
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I'm more concerned about an AMD GPU. Nvidia Pascal would be much more efficient and powerful enough for 1800p60. Stop making the pro thinner! 2012 size is perfect. Larger battery and GPU is preferred Apple.
Then just get a larger laptop with an Nvidia Pascal video card and a secondary battery. There will be plenty of options within a few months (Pascal mobile cards were only released a week ago). These lack of choices generally only exist within the Apple ecosystem, so either leave it or stop complaining. They'll give you what they tell you you want and that will be that.
Re: What about the circuit traces? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, you shouldn't. But that's the direction Apple seems to be willing to go.
I used Mac Pro for 7 years, but built a workstation PC that I'm using now - the 'trash can' Mac Pro just didn't have decent GPU options, and they haven't changed in two years. Is there anyone actually buying that thing right now?
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I'm an apple developer with a PC for games. I shouldn't need to resort to Hackintosh to get the Mac OS on good hardware.
I agree you shouldn't have to, but that is the agreement when you enter the Apple ecosystem. Which is a choice you made. You knew Apple's main focus is on marketing and extreme profit margins, not catering to high end users, so this shouldn't be a surprise to you.
You are forced to use a substandard development environment and have a separate work and personal computer because of your career choices, but these certainly aren't extreme hardships. I don't like having to save my work to the cloud every time I t
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They use Cyrix technology, Rambus technology and Microunity technology too.
Transmeta is still not relevant today any more than the MediaProcessor is.
Re:What about the batteries?? (Score:4, Interesting)
The cost of switching them are pretty reasonable at an apple store too. I was surprised, as I would have assumed it would be an egregious price (because... apple). The only painful part of the process was losing the laptop for a few days.
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There are loads of genuine ones on Amazon and eBay.
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Apple laptops are not designed to be user-serviceable (or even necessarily third-party serviceable).
You're not the the consumer Apple is interested in. Just buy something else and put Linux on it.
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Apple laptops are not designed to be user-serviceable (or even necessarily third-party serviceable).
Laptops in general are not designed to be user-serviceable, nor even necessarily third-party serviceable. Apple laptops are really no worse or better than any other recent laptop manufacturer's design.
But, with the exception of the keyboard on the Unibody models, the stuff that people need to change (Hard Drive/SSD, battery and trackpad, and RAM on socketed models) are generally pretty easy to get to and replace.
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If you open a Macbook Air, the entire thing is filled with tamper-proof epoxy and glue and any type of serviceability is practically impossible.
Bullshit [ifixit.com].
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Go ahead and "shitlist" them. Nobody but you will care.
sharp edge (Score:5, Insightful)
i vote for getting rid of the sharp edge that's grating the skin off my wrists. i'd similarly welcome a computer that can keep itself cool without sounding like an asthmatic jet engine. it would also be nice to be able to fall asleep with a running computer on my chest/abdomen without being woken up by a burning skin sensation.
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the ridiculous noise was the first thing i noticed when my employer bought these computers. there was no dust in them back then. there simply isn't a large enough air exhaust to be quiet.
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the ridiculous noise was the first thing i noticed when my employer bought these computers. there was no dust in them back then. there simply isn't a large enough air exhaust to be quiet.
Macs are the quietest laptops (about 1/3 of the population) in our company of 5000+. Are you sure you or your employer aren't mining bitcoin in the background or something?
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So you have only Macs and bargain-basement Acers?
Really, Apple choose style over function when it comes to cooling. Smaller inlet and outlet vents means higher sound levels compared to a machine with large (clearly visible) vents even if the fan and heatsink/heatpipe is kept the same. However Apple machines tend to have small heatsinks, small fans.
And then physics get in the way -> louder. Yes one can innovate by improving the fan efficiency, the sound profile of the fan (by spacing the fan blades right)
Re:sharp edge (Score:5, Informative)
i vote for getting rid of the sharp edge that's grating the skin off my wrists.
I bought a nail file, one with two different grits.
I filed down the case-edges where it hits the wrists. Also the two sharp edges of the "case-opener" indent. Problem solved.
Re:sharp edge (Score:5, Funny)
You are doing what to an Apple product? No!!!
The proper way to handle this is to pre-grate your wrists prior to using the magical device. The Apple Watch 2 is rumored to have it built-in.
Re:sharp edge (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't Mac OS have cooling profiles like Windows does? On Windows 7 and later you can configure the cooling profile in the advanced power management settings to be either "active" or "passive". Active ramps the fan up, passive throttles the CPU to keep the temperature down. I used to use it when I was downloading stuff overnight to keep the fan on silent.
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I can understand the sharp edge comment, but not the heat/noise. My MacBook Pro runs cool as a cucumber and damned near silent. It's like church mouse compared to the leaf blower that is my HP work machine. I'm not doubting you. I just wonder if there is a difference between years/models.
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May depend on what's being used. My old MacBook had issues displaying certain pages in the browser (flash video, I think?) and would go from quiet and cool to full-processor and hot in a matter of a minute. The new MacBook Pro is also generally good, but turn on Skype, for instance, and it's transformed into a heating unit almost instantaneously.
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May depend on what's being used. My old MacBook had issues displaying certain pages in the browser (flash video, I think?) and would go from quiet and cool to full-processor and hot in a matter of a minute.
That's because Adobe won't do hardware video acceleration on Macs. It's a well-known problem, and yet another reason to ditch Adobe, like I have. My 2013 MacBook Pro came without Flash installed, and I decided to see how long I could live without it.
I still haven't installed ANY Adobe product, including Acrobat Reader nor Flash. Don't miss it one little bit.
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It can also be a difference in software.
My company uses a particular video conference software that is developed by people that apparently won some kind of bet to NOT use any of the hardware accelerated codecs for video and audio. Join a meeting, watch the CPU spike, the fans spin up. Leave the meeting, fans turn off after about 15 seconds.
Touch screen function keys (Score:4, Insightful)
Fantastic. Nothing suits a keyboard better than having to look down at it to use it.
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Re:Touch screen function keys (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Touch screen function keys (Score:4, Informative)
Thankfully, they reverted this with the 2015 model.
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ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014 Review [laptopmag.com]
The reality of function keys (Score:2)
Nothing suits a keyboard better than having to look down at it to use it.
In reality, because I don't use them much, I have to look down when I want to use the current function keys to make sure of what I'm hitting. Why would this new feature be any different?
I do know it would substantially increase my use of the function keys. I wish that all key-caps were customizable so that I could see what actions would be performed from each key when a modifier key (like Alt) was held down...
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Well, this is not new, my stinkpad carbon has the feature and there were so many complaints that the following version went back to keys instead of the touch strip.
Stupid idea already proven in the market to be stupid.
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Yeah! Just like removing the physical keys doomed the iPhone because we all know that Blackberry proved looong ago that physical keys are better!
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How long until it becomes muscle memory?
Setup a mapping for photoshop and use it every day. Some people can swype type on their 'feedbackless' touch screens.
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Now how about a Mac mini overhaul? The last change was two years ago and it was actually a downgrade from the 2012 models.
There's something really wrong at Apple for still selling computers in 2016 with 5400RPM hard drives and only 4GB of RAM.
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
"Pay today for what you'll use next year"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Paying up front for capacity you'll need only later may make sense for a house, but not for a laptop.
When I bought each of my Mac laptops, I knew I'd want to upgrade their memory eventually. In general, "maxing them out" would have entailed spending thousands of dollars for memory that I wouldn't need for another year or two -- at which point I'd be able to buy it from a third-party seller at a tenth of the cost. Same thing with storage.
It's actually even worse than that -- for my first pro-level laptop (a G3 in 1999), the largest Apple-supplied memory configuration was 384MB, but third-party upgrades took it to 768. For my current daily driver (a last-of-the-line 17" MBP), Apple specs said its maximum RAM was 8GB, and that was all they'd sell you. I bought it from Apple's refurb store in 2012 or 2013, I think, when I saw that there would be no new 17-inch models. I immediately upgraded it from the stock 4GB to 16GB, at a total cost of something like $95 (I forgot to send in the $10 MIR). Buying an 8GB instead of a 4GB model would have increased the price by hundreds of dollars. And then there's storage -- I put up with the stock 500GB spinner for a couple of years, then popped in a 1TB SSD I got for under $300. When 4TB or 10TB SSDs are cost-effective, if I want one of those, it's another easy swap.
The "just buy all the machine you'll need up front" approach is wasteful. You'll get more capacity and spend less money in total by starting with just enough, then upgrading. But if cost is no object, or you're solidly committed to just replacing your machine every year, knock yourself out. At least with Apple gear you get good resale value.
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+1 amen.
I guess the Mac Mini was cutting into the Laptop side too much. Uh, how you you stop gimping a good product turning it into something people don't want.
Expandable RAM, an upgraded CPU, an upgraded GPU, lots of ports and you're good to go.
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The iMac is still Apple's best deal if you don't need full computer capability on the road. In my corporate days I carried the big MacBoh Pro everywhere. Today I get more power for less with the 27" iMac plus an iPad Mini. No more airport and hotel hassle that goes with carrying an expensive laptop around, and in any case the 17" MBP is no longer made.
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Especially when the Intel Nuc has finally caught up.
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Other laptop manufacturers are catching up on the laptops too......for a long time, Apple construction was clearly superior, but it's not so clear anymore.
About f__king time. (Score:2)
Great. Now what about their iMacs and Mac Minis?
Piss on Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
The updated notebooks will be thinner
Fuck off
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Yes, but does it give a close clean shave?
Thinner / Lighter ... who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty soon Apple will end up like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Because after all you can never be too thin and too rich.
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Same thing with the iPhone. I would like an iPhone that is thicker because it has a bigger battery that lasts twice as long.
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All phone makers are guilt of this retardation of thinner.
I want an iphone 6 plus that is 2X thick and gives me 4 days between charges. Sadly all the freaking add on cases that can do this are 4X thicker with a lot of wasted space for plastic and you cant buy a nice aluminum one that is well designed.
Even the apple battery case is a fat ugly monster.
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Don't most people just throw their phones on their charger at night when they go to sleep???
Re:Thinner / Lighter ... who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong. You are supposed to have a stack of Thunderbold HDDs and GPUs on your desk. And a USB hub or two, plus USB to HDMI and USB to ethernet dongles. Come on, why wouldn't you want all those cool accessories?!
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Keeping the pro the same thickness would be fine and for the love of all that is holy support M.2 and expandable memory. This anorexic design language needs to stop now. Why can I not have a good old HDMI or display port connection? I also need more than one USB connection because I really do not want to have to haul around a hub with me. Ethernet. Yes please.
Re:Thinner / Lighter ... who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
I had no problem upgrading the drive in my Mid2012 MBP. Memory is a different issue but I've never had a need to do so but the whole "you can't replace your drive!!!!1111!!!!" is on-its-face false.
Speaking of false, let me know how the hell you feel your Mid2012 MBP has any relevance in a discussion about how hard it is to upgrade their current line of hardware.
There are two things you can now upgrade after purchase in Apple laptops; Jack and Shit.
Re:Thinner / Lighter ... who cares (Score:5, Funny)
There are two things you can now upgrade after purchase in Apple laptops; Jack and Shit.
I heard that they were removing the jack on their products [slashdot.org] so it looks like you'll only be able to upgrade the shit.
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Yeah and I heard that they were removing THE INTERNAL FLOPPY TOO! OMG!!!
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ram takes 6 seconds to upgrade. I'm rocking 16gb in mine.
I also am rocking dual hard drives. a 1TB ssd drive and a 1tb spinning drive in place of the useless optical drive in my late 2012 15" MBP.
being a quad i7 that was the fastest option at that time, it's still faster even in all the benchmarks than the new Lenovo I was given at work.
Sad that a late 2012 laptop kicks the ass out of what companies are selling today at the $1000 pricepoint.
Re:Thinner / Lighter ... who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
I genuinely wonder exactly how much Apple cares about the creative segment anymore. You're right that PCIe SSDs are great for video editing (and even high counts of multitrack audio editing), but 1TB (the highest available in a MacBook at any price) gets really cramped, really fast. If Apple weren't trying to make their laptops look like a supermodel on a hunger strike, having a PCIe system disk and a 2TB, 7200RPM storage disk would be great...at the very least, two USB ports is ridiculous. The new GPUs are a welcome update, since the existing chipsets were being overtaken by even midrange, $800 Asus laptops...but it'll be interesting to see how Apple balances 'thin', 'heat dissipation', 'battery life', and 'performance'; I have a gut feeling that 'performance' is going to be the weak link.
On the software front, Aperture was discontinued, there's been no update to iDVD to allow Blu-Ray burning, Final Cut folks are starting to look into Adobe Premiere, and Logic Pro and Garageband are starting to become increasingly blurry; Ableton and FL Studio are both becoming solid contenders in the space while ProTools has become a lot more afforable than when Logic started making inroads.
I'd argue that the creative fields are more in a place where they need Apple more than Apple needs them. Windows (Win10 upgrade hell and telemetry concerns not withstanding) has done plenty of growing up since the Win9x days when Apple dominated the creative market for good reason, and with the exception of the first party Apple applications (Logic, FCP, Motion) nearly all the major creative production applications (Adobe Everything, Quark, Avid, Ableton) are cross platform, so it's not even that there's a whole lot of revamping established workflows or losing access to past projects that's much of a problem.
Switching to Windows, where hardware choices abound from the $600 budget-friendly Asus machines to the $3,000+ Origin/FalconNW/Sager hardware behemoths, has never been easier, meaning that plenty of the aversion to switching is the Apple lock-in, whether literal (e.g. an extensive backlog of Final Cut projects) or perceived (the file management learning curve between OSX and Windows), meaning that all Apple has to do to keep the Apple-or-bust creative market is to make sure the past 2-3 releases of those applications keep working with OSX, and as long as that takes place, Apple can keep slimming down their laptops to cater to the Facebook/Youtube crowd with little to no consequence. I'd wager that even if Apple went down to Intel Integrated graphics across their Pro line of MacBooks, Apple would probably still make more money than keeping dedicated nVidia/AMD chipsets, because they could tout "thinner", "doesn't run as hot", and "longer battery life" as features, all three of which matter a lot more to the majority of the present day Macbook purchasing crowd than disk I/O or render times.
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The HP Spectre is a beautiful machine. Unfortunately, it runs Windows.
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Strangely, "pros" that have to take their MacBook Pro with them everywhere care about thinner and lighter.
To a certain point, they care anyway.
When I started hearing multiple rumors regarding the upcoming "thinner and lighter MacBook Pro", I went to my boss and (successfully) lobbied for the purchase of a current-gen machine - I was on a five year old MBP and due for a replacement next year. While it sadly doesn't have an Ethernet port, it does otherwise have a good collection (including an SD card slot, which I use regularly)... and I really don't want to carry a USB-C dongle around everywhere. My boss' boss h
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> graphics processing abilities have been good if not amazing (because I need a system I can connect a 4k monitor to, not that must have the ultimate framerate for gaming).
Maybe you don't mind crappy 30 FPS, but us graphics guys certainly need some beefy power. The nVidia 750M, on my Mid 2014 MBP is getting a little long in the tooth.
Thank-god for Bizon Box eGPU [bizon-tech.com] where I can use a real GPU. I need to get one of these bad boys -- I see that it supports my GTX 980 TI with the option to remove the front pl
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
How about proper delete AND backspace keys? (Score:4, Insightful)
then just keep the function keys where they are
Personally I couldn't give a rip about the function keys. They generally aren't very useful to me anyway. What I'd like Apple to do is put a proper goddam backspace AND delete keys on their laptops. It's annoying as hell to have to hit Fn+delete on a Macbook.
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...and real arrow keys. I know. It's a dream.
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don't they have USB ports in Macs any more?
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I understand your personal pain, but face it: no one is using function keys.
They are completely useless for people like me who can not memorize what Fx is supposed to mean in App 1 and why does it mean something else in App 2?
I only use F-keys in games, where their position on the keyboard is visually connected to actions on the screen, e.g. F1 is the left most action and F12 is the right most. E.g. in Eve Online.
Actually I ditch programs that have stupid shortcuts. I mean: EMACS e.g. instead of C-F (for FI
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So we'll get your flip phone when we pry it from your cold, dead, arthritic fingers?
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Re: cupertino a go go. (Score:5, Insightful)
Their only useful purpose in OS X, realistically, has been for controlling volume and screen brightness anyway. Maybe this will cause companies to come up with more interesting uses for them. I'm not holding my breath.
The bigger concern is that they're making it thinner yet again. That probably means:
Both of those are deal-breakers for me. We've already gotten to the point where my battery lasts for an average of only 2.5 hours on essentially brand new hardware because the battery capacity hasn't kept up with the CPU's non-idle power consumption, and several mission-critical apps that I run almost every day are horrible battery hogs (in no particular order, Chrome, Finale 2012, Lightroom 6, Photoshop CS6).
Want to know what would make me happy?
I couldn't care less about function keys. I couldn't care less about making the laptop thinner. I want the laptop to be more capable. And I think I speak for basically 100% of Mac laptop users when I say that. Absolutely nobody outside of Apple cares about making laptops thinner at this point. We passed the point where that matters at the point where it dropped below the thickness of a small paperback book—basically with the most recent pre-Retina MacBook Pro. Every bit of thinness after that is widely seen as engineers doing something solely because they can, rather than because it improves the product. And for the most part, the excessive thinness has made the product functionally WORSE with each generation.
If Apple is really serious about retaining actual pro users, they need to stop actively making the pro machines less functional and start moving in the exact opposite direction. What I'm seeing described here sounds like a MacBook, not a MacBook Pro. As far as I'm concerned, the last truly pro Macbook was discontinued about two years ago. Just saying.
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I agree with most of what you said (8TB is pretty extreme - how do you get that with PCIe SSDs?).
Also, 32GB RAM would be preferable.
Both storage and RAM sizing increases look debatable with a slimmer body...
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With solid state storage you can cram in effectively arbitrarily large amounts of storage in a tiny amount of space, so that will not be a problem with a thinner laptop. But it doesn't matter. Battery capacity will be lower, which means it won't be a professional laptop, which means it won't really need terrabytes of storage.
It sounds like the next MacBook Pro will basically be a better and slightly larger MacBook Air. That could be a smart short-term move by Apple, but it will kill them in the long run whe
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As a programmer, I disagree with most of what you said (I have different needs) but I'm totally on board with your comments about the magsafe connector. Version 2 sucks balls.
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I agree, but would still prefer version 2 over a USB-C power solution. MagSafe 1 and 2 have saved my laptop numerous times.
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I couldn't care less about function keys.
I'll bet you could.....for example, if you were stranded in the desert looking for water, I'll bet you'd care even less about function keys than you do now.
Lenovo tried capacitive touch function keystrip (Score:2)
video gamers and apple? (Score:2)
What gamer wants their thin and high cost hardware?
Let's see what is bad low ram count with high priced upgrades + soldered in so you can't DIY.
Some systems even have soldered storage starting small 128GB is not that much for gaming.
For laptops starting price of $2000 for a lower end gpu with a high res display.
"expert users such as video gamers" (Score:3)
17" Pro in a big way please... (Score:2)
Give us a real pro macbook.
17" 4K screen and a 8 core XEON processor with 3 SSD 0.2 slots to raid with. and a killer dual video card setup make this a $5000 STFU Windows Fanboi powerhouse.
Sadly they dont care about us professionals that need screen and processor power coupled with raw speed. They cater to the "i surf the internet" crowds with this low power long battery life that care about thinner and lighter more than actually having a computer that can run anything.
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They could do both..keep the Air line for the super thin/long battery time users and beef up the Pro line...like those lines ought to be already.
Although I would like that, there is another way (Score:2)
I too would love to see a return of the 17" form factor, I had the last model they made and loved that very much. It's still used to this day by my wife though mostly for remote VPN into her work...
That said I have found that a pretty good replacement is the 15" Macbook Pro and using the iPad Pro as a second screen via the Duet app. Then it's practical to carry a second screen with you, and I'd have the iPad with my anyway for development...
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They're already at ~3K native if you turn off the high-DPI scaling.
Overhaul = make un-upgradeable? (Score:2)
I seriously wonder sometimes why Apple, who makes 30% on all media and app purchases, all of which is profit at this point, feels the need to lock customers into non-upgradable hardware. Yes, it's nice to be able to charge $350 for a $10 SSD upgrade, but there comes a point where you have to decide whether you want all these devices to end up as landfill after 2 years. I know it's not 1992 anymore, and computers are "cheap," but it's still expected IMO to be able to add storage capacity or RAM to the "pro"
What an OLED touch strip could be good for... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
Think about how awful Apple's current scheme is, where fkeys are overloaded for brightness control, volume control, keyboard backlight control (really?), and whatever else.
Now picture mapping those controls onto a touch-strip with a display. A small cluster of controls to the left (right, whatever), one for screen brightness, one for volume, one for keyboard backlight (again, whatever).
Touch one, and a slider control expands out from it. Slide left to decrease, slide right to increase. Maybe, if extensive user testing supports it, "drag off the bottom" to commit your new setting or "drag off the top" to cancel it. Or maybe just lifting your finger commits it, and cancel isn't needed; we certainly don't get "cancel" with the current up/down key controls. Maybe touch detection only gives an x-axis value, but if I were sitting on Apple's patents, I'd certainly add at least a rudimentary y-axis measurement, and multi-touch detection.
Double-tap (or "mash") the volume control to mute or unmute.
Double-tap or mash screen brightness to blank or restore the screen.
Don't want controls? Map a simple out-of-band gesture (again, drag-up or drag-down seems ideal) to move between fkeys, system functions, and application functions.
I don't have any idea what Apple will actually do with this strip, but I hope it's less of a disappointment than their touch keyboard and multitouch stuff so far. I used the FingerWorks Touchstream keyboard for years, and I'm still bitter that Apple hasn't used more than 30% of the gestural technology they got when they bought out and shut down that company.
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Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
What's "many"? I have no idea what the numbers might be, but among power users, like programmers, graphic artists and others who make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts to make their work efficient, it's indeed very common. In other words, among the sort of people who are likely to buy a Pro laptop.
augh, srsly? (Score:2)
>> a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application.
Oh, you mean like "function keys" do?
>> to simplify keyboard shortcuts traditionally used by experienced users... it could display editing commands like cut and paste during word processing tasks
Yes, because a "key" that only exists some of the time, and has no tactile feedback is easier to use without looking at it than ctrl-C.
Look - programmable OLED keys are neat, I get it. But two
Sounds like good bye Apple (Score:2)
Item 1: Most Apple laptops with discrete graphics chips have problems. If they give up on the Iris Pro models, I don't want to know what happens.
Item 2: Pretty OLED touch bands are for content consumers (remember that part of the world who is calling Apple users "sheep"? Maybe they were right.). Content producers (programmers, designers, whatever) need physical keys with tactile feedback because they don't look at the fucking keyboard when working.
I switched to Macs from WinTel boxes with Linux on them like
Removable batteries (Score:3)
And I still insist that non removable batteries are dangerous.
Based on what? Who exactly has been injured/killed in a manner that removable batteries would have solved? Failing that what is the theoretical but obviously extremely rare failure mode that having removable batteries would fix?
I don't have an argument that removable batteries are a good idea but I just don't see it as a safety issue.
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A removable battery means the machine is more fire resistant. And you can make sure it is really powered down, as pointed out the above reply to the AC.
In my personal case, a defective battery that was overheating can be removed so I can still use my machine while plugged in without risking a fire.
I just lost an iPhone because the battery swelled up (didn't burn) and destroyed it two weeks after not using or charging it. If it were removable, it would have just popped the cover off, I could have bought a ne
Re: (Score:2)
I work in a building full of people using MBPs and MBAs and there has never once been an explosion or fire. So, I'm going to disagree with your assessment about non-removable batteries. What matters is the quality of the batteries and the circuit that controls charging and draw.
Re:Ah yes, more soft keys (Score:5, Informative)
Removable batteries can be inspected visually for defects that generally precede failure.
Typically, this means bulging, but unusual hot spots are also good indicators (assuming you've handled the battery enough to know how it feels normally).
It is also very easy to hard reboot a device with a removable battery and to ensure it is unpowered when opening it up to troubleshoot or upgrade.
Laptop batteries are capable of producing dangerous electric shocks, and it is the most basic safety measure to isolate all sources of energy before working on any equipment.
Re: (Score:2)
Base it on the A series CPUs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Will Intel release a new CPU that has more then a few percentage points better performance then the ones from 4 years ago? It not worth a few thousand to replace a perfectly working laptop for a barely noticeable performance increase.
Performance is very noticeable between the I5's prior to Haswell and Skylake. Even those two are very different.
But as always Apple does it best (Score:2)
Pretty sure function display stuff was done before even Lenovo and the like.
But the reason to cheer Apple doing this is that unlike third parties trying to promote an accessory, this will be a standard feature on laptops sold, and as such will get a lot more application support and cool uses of the tech.
Also hoping for the force feedback stuff they use in the trackpads now to go into the function keys so they "feel" pressed when you tap them.